'Corona Bible' (2022).
Pier Dola is a Netherlands-based underground artist, whose comics show a distorted and disturbing version of our world, that is both fascinating and enlightening. Dola's comics 'From Granada to Cordoba' (2021) and 'Corona Bible' (2022) have been published for an international audience by Fantagraphics Underground Books.
Background
Remaining mysterious about his real name and origins, the artist's back story is just as impalpable as his work. On the Fantagraphics website, Dola is presented as hailing from Zielona Gora, Poland. However, unconfirmed rumors hint that he is actually from South America. And while 1965 is mentioned as his year of birth, he might as well be younger. As his main influences, Dola mentions 'El siniestro Doctor Mortis', the multi-genre series of comics created by the writer and actor Juan Marino Cabello, and the works of Alberto Breccia and Carlos Nine. The artist allegedly lived in Italy, France and Germany before settling in the Netherlands, where he was a squatter before he got married. Dola nowadays lives and work in the Dutch city of Rotterdam.
'From Granada to Cordoba' (2021).
From Granada to Cordoba
Although Dola had been posting nightmarrish and surreal comic pages on Facebook for several years, his idiosyncratic comics first came to the public attention when the Seattle-based publisher Fantagraphics released his debut graphic novel 'From Granada to Cordoba' (November 2021). The story is a scatological odyssey of a dying main character, who wanders the streets in a state of self-obsessed delirium, leaving a fecal trail as he goes. Satirically exploring themes of sex, death, modern culture and politics, Dola presented a hallucinatory, near-psychotic narrative, mixed with dark humor and gory visual metaphors (for instance the protuberant, snake-like rectum dragging behind the unnamed everyman protagonist).
'Pánico' (2023).
Corona Bible
A couple of months after his debut book, Fantagraphics released Pier Dola's second graphic novel, the voluminous 'Corona Bible' (March 2022). In 500 pages, Dola sketches a grim tale of life in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, covering everything from conspiracy theories to fascist cops and from empty shops to masturbation in isolation. Too terrified to leave his ratty apartment during the pandemic, Dola's main character turns exclusively to social media for human contact, while his quarantine routine disintegrates into madness.
Comic page published on Facebook on 26 January 2023.
Pánico
Dola's next book, 'Pánico' (2023), was released by the independent Spanish publishing imprint Unbrained Comics. Surreal and largely wordless, the book is a bloodsoaked exploration of life, evolution and authority, compiled out of hundreds of psychotic drawings the artist kept under his bed.
Originals by Pier Dola are for sale in the Amsterdam comic shop Lambiek, where he also signs his graphic novel 'Pánico' on 27 October 2023.